In her dream, a monkey had led her to the hidden door. Now it was the frail will-o’-the-wisp of reawakening memory that drew her on. Very carefully she edged round the greatest of the
traps. It stirred slightly, its great jaws opening like a beast hunting in its dreams, then closing again. She drew her fingertips down the smooth tiles of the wall until they found and tugged at
the hidden catch. A door swung open away from her.
The last time I entered this room I went mad. Zouelle had to hold me down.
She tightened her grip on the lantern and stepped into the room.
It was a small room, and there were hundreds of faces in it. Some were moulded in clay or cast in plaster, but most were drawings, rapid but detailed sketches in coloured pastels or charcoal.
They were all images of the same woman, Neverfell could see that at a glance, and with a shock of familiarity she recognized again and again expressions from the Tragedy Range.
The woman was not Madame Appeline. Her skin was dappled and her hair long and red. Her eyes were large and grey-green. Her features were gaunt, agonized and infinitely expressive. The pictures
seemed to be arranged in some kind of sequence. In the pictures to the left of the door the woman was merely thin, but as Neverfell’s gaze darted frantically through the images around the
room, she could see her growing frailer and more haggard. The woman was dying before her eyes. Finally, on the right hand side of the door was what looked like a death mask, the cheeks fallen in,
the mouth expressionless at last.
There was another small door set in the opposite wall, but Neverfell scarcely noticed it, because her gaze was drawn to the mural immediately above it. It was a sketch in pastel and tempura,
drawn directly on to the plaster of the wall itself. It showed a full-length image of the woman, so that the manacles round her legs were visible. A red-haired child was being wrested from her
arms. The faces of both woman and child were full of utter anguish, and had been sketched in the most meticulous detail.
On the floor at Neverfell’s feet were the remains of a clay mask that had been smashed to pieces. To judge by the fragments, it had shown the face of a child, her expression contorted by
grief and rage so terrible that one expected to hear it screaming. When she looked at it, Neverfell’s hands and arms throbbed with remembered bruises.
The room seemed to be shuddering, and Neverfell realized that her lantern-hand was shaking. There was a feather-faint noise behind her, and she spun round.
There was one Madame Appeline face in the room after all. It was between her and the door to the gallery, and it was not a mask.
Neverfell flung herself backwards as Madame Appeline’s arm slashed down, and the bodkin aimed at her face missed by inches.
‘You’re not my mother.’ Neverfell could hardly find the breath for words. ‘
She
was.’ She gestured wildly with her shard at the dozens of images of the
red-haired woman. ‘And you killed her.’
‘She was ill when she came here.’ Madame Appeline’s heart-shaped face wore one of the tender Faces from the Tragedy Range, but now that Neverfell had seen the original she knew
it for the cruel mockery it was. ‘All I did was let her die.’
‘Why?’ erupted Neverfell. ‘Just so you could draw her expressions, and use them as Faces?’
‘Just? Did you say
just
? Ebbing away before my sketchbook was the most useful thing she ever did. Before my Tragedy Range, Faces were varnish. I made them into true art.’
Something inside Neverfell seemed to crack with these words. She gave a croak of pure anguish and rage, and lunged at Madame Appeline with her shard of crystal tree. But at the last moment the
muscles of her arm seemed to weaken. Although the flesh and bone before her belonged to a cruel and calculating enemy, the expression it wore came from the red-haired woman in the pictures, from
Neverfell’s own mother. It was a stolen Face, but Neverfell could not strike at it, and Madame Appeline knew it.
‘You,’ hissed the Facesmith. Her tone was poison. ‘I never asked for
you
.
‘I had the perfect bargaining position. Maxim Childersin wanted to build a secret shaft to the surface, one that he could reach through the Twister behind his townhouse. So he needed the
help of somebody in the Doldrums. My tunnels were ideally placed, so he approached me.
‘I told him my price. I wanted an outsider with a particularly expressive face, one I could study in extreme situations of my choosing. Preferably with green eyes, so that her Faces would
suit me well.
One
outsider.
‘And his agents in the overground found me the perfect specimen. They told her of the oils in Caverna that could cure her illness, and she paid them all she had to smuggle her into the
city. But she would not leave her child behind. And when she was lowered down the shaft, there
you
were, in her arms.’
‘You hate me.’ Neverfell could not understand the icy vitriol in the Facesmith’s voice.
‘I have always hated you. The first moment I saw you, there was something in your face . . . I found uses for you, of course. Your mother managed her finest Faces when you were pulled from
her arms, but your face – no child should have looked so angry, so implacable. You made my blood run cold.’
Half-forgotten fragments of memory were whirling into place. The scene from Neverfell’s Wine vision came back to her, now with new clarity.
The same thing, every day. The half an hour in her mother’s arms so warm, so short. Then the dry click of the clock striking naught, and the strong hands dragging her away. Screaming
and screaming, losing her grip on the beloved hand one more time and being thrown into the cupboard room . . .
‘Your blood has always been cold,’ said Neverfell, her voice shaking.
‘I have sensibilities!’ snapped Madame Appeline. ‘You bruised them, shattered them. After your mother died, your face became a thorn in me. So Childersin gave me Wine to make
you forget everything. I gave you the finest luxuries so as to sketch your reactions, and I bought you a dozen dresses the better to set off your expressions, but all the time I sensed that your
vengeful self was just buried. Waiting for its chance. And then one day you vanished from my tunnels. Disappeared completely. That infernal Kleptomancer!’
Another two pieces of the puzzle. It was the Kleptomancer, then, who had stolen Neverfell at the age of five, and left her on some long-forgotten whim in Grandible’s tunnels. And it was
Madame Appeline who had offered the reward for the master thief’s capture, desperate to reclaim the child who knew too much.
‘I never forgot you,’ continued the Facesmith. ‘That a child’s face could hold so much rage, so much defiance . . . it did not seem possible. I have created a thousand
Faces, and always I feared seeing that one expression of yours pushing through the others. It would be like seeing a ghost.
‘Perhaps you blame me for taking your memories? I left you clean. Purged of all your ghosts.
I
am the one who has been haunted all my life. Haunted by
you.
’
The Facesmith made another unexpected lunge, and Neverfell dodged aside, one hand raised to protect her face. The bodkin point traced a painful line across the back of her hand. The dance of
stab and dodge had moved the pair of them around each other, so that it was now Neverfell who stood with her back to the door.
‘And then one day I
did
see you,’ hissed Madame Appeline. ‘Large as life, and in my tunnels. I knew you at once. Maxim promised that you would not live to threaten me,
but his assassin failed to drown you. And then when he went to the Enquiry to buy you, he changed his mind and decided to keep you alive. But I knew –
knew
– that you would only
be safe dead. If only the Zookeeper had been worth the fee I paid him!’
‘You stole my mother’s Faces,’ whispered Neverfell. ‘You stole them, and you sold them, and you walked around wearing them, and using them to make people do what you
wanted. You used my mother’s Faces on
me
. And all the time you were her murderess or close enough. All that time you were trying to murder me.’
‘Do not look at me! Not with that Face!’ Madame Appeline was shaking from head to foot, the feathers in her hair quivering like insect antennae. ‘Just as you looked when you
were an imp of five. I should have snuffled you out then!’
Madame Appeline made another pounce and slash, and Neverfell again leaped back, the motion carrying her out through the door and on to the gallery. All around, the traps eased into light once
more, sensing the frenzied movements and the rush of rapid breaths. Some were blindly gaping, their fangs so fine and pale they looked like fringes of fur.
Madame Appeline struck out with her bodkin again and again like a giant stinging insect. Neverfell dodged, dodged, dodged. All the while the shard was in her hand, and her mother’s tender
gaze was before her, pasted on to a murderess’s face.
You’re not my mother
You’re not my mother
You’re not my mother
‘You’re not my mother!’ Neverfell lashed out wildly, scarcely knowing whether she meant to wound or to parry. ‘Take off her Face!’ The shard drew a long oblique
line upward, and almost entirely missed. Almost, except for the very, very tip, which just nicked the chin of Madame Appeline’s precious alabaster face, causing a tiny pearl of blood to
swell. The Facesmith gave a wail of utter horror, clapped a hand to her chin, and leaped backwards.
It was a leap too far, and in the wrong direction. Directly behind Madame Appeline lay the largest of the traps, monstrous mouth agape. Neverfell had just enough time to see the Facesmith fall
sprawling into its maw before its upper jaw descended, the fine teeth meshing like two combs locking together.
An eerie silence fell. In spite of everything, Neverfell’s conscience smote her, and she tried to prise the jaws apart, but in vain. After years fed on grubs, the trap had found prey worth
its maw, and it sat there intractable, wearing a grin wider than any the Facesmith had ever designed. There were no signs of life from within.
Neverfell ventured slowly back into the hidden room once more, and stared around her at the hundreds of sketches. They were pictures of pain, but also strength, tenderness, endurance, love.
She was looking at me. The love in all these Faces . . . it was meant for me.
Neverfell took down one of the pictures of her mother, and placed it carefully in her pocket.
The front runners of the drudge army met up with Neverfell just as she was scampering back to her post by Madame Appeline’s broken front door. To her delight, Erstwhile
was among them. He was gruff as ever when she nearly squeezed him in two with a hug.
‘It worked,’ he summarized curtly.
It had been, Neverfell now remembered, the part of the plan that had caused the most heated debate. There was simply no way to bring hundreds of drudges to the Doldrums without somebody
noticing, even if the Court was in chaos. The plan that was finally concocted was audacious in the extreme. Instead of trying to sneak up from Drudgery, the drudge masses would rise and pretend to
attack the palace. Then the drudge army would let itself be ‘put to rout’ and ‘flee’ . . . towards the Doldrums, in just the direction they had wished to go in the first
place.
‘They fell for it,’ Erstwhile pronounced with pride. ‘Half the Court – the half that isn’t tearing itself apart right now – is holed up in the palace, hiding.
And when we ran away, they thought they’d won. Nobody tried to stop us. They even put up barricades behind us! So now if anybody wants to chase us they got to come through those
first.’
‘Did . . .’ Neverfell scarcely wanted to ask the question. ‘Did anyone get hurt?’
Erstwhile looked stony again, then gave her shoulder a short, slightly painful punch. ‘It’s a war, Nev. Everyone knew the odds. And we only lost a couple out of four hundred. Just
take us to your precious sky so it’s all worth it.’
Four hundred drudges and their children, all trusting in my plan.
Neverfell did not know whether to be staggered that there were so many, or saddened that there were not more. This was
not even one-tenth of the population of Drudgery. The others had agreed to rebel, but had not been willing to leave Caverna for the hazards of the unknown overground.
I suppose not everybody can
bear to give up everything they have ever known, however bad their life is.
The passage beyond the hidden room took a number of twists before coming to a dead halt with a trapdoor set in the roof. When Neverfell pushed this up, she came out under the breakfast table in
the Morning Room.
‘Zouelle!’ Neverfell ran to fling her arms round her friend. ‘You’re here! You did it!’
‘Neverfell!’ Zouelle returned the hug. ‘You took so long I thought you’d been caught! My family still haven’t found a way through the hazards I set up in the
corridor, but it’s only a matter of time. Let’s hope it’s long enough.’
Drudges of all sizes and ages were pouring out from beneath the breakfast table now, and peering around the room. The white tablecloth, the pristine silver and the crystal dishes only earned a
brief glance, however. All eyes were fixed on the ceiling immediately above the table.
Zouelle had unscrewed the large, blue glass hemisphere that had fitted into the ceiling, and left it on the table. In its place could be seen a round hole, some three feet wide, from which a
mousey-grey radiance was emitting.
Neverfell clambered unsteadily on the table, and peered up into the hole. The shaft soared up and up, a faint glimmer telling her that the walls were mirrored. It ended at the furthest point in
a tiny dull coin of light.
Sky. I can see the sky.
Her spirits took off like a flock of doves, and she almost expected to see them spiral upward towards that dim luminescence in a flurry of white wings. The sense of relief was so intense that
she almost collapsed. Only then did she realize that she had been secretly fearing that she had been wrong about everything, and that she might find herself looking up into a nest of trap-lanterns
like those above Madame Appeline’s grove.